Remembering the largest urban fire in N.C. history

George Moulton, partner in the Wootten-Moulton photography studio, pushed open the trap door at the roof of the five-story Elks Building on Pollock Street, shoved his tripod and camera through, and hurried to the northern edge of the building.

George Moulton, partner in the Wootten-Moulton photography studio, pushed open the trap door at the roof of the five-story Elks Building on Pollock Street, shoved his tripod and camera through, and hurried to the northern edge of the building.

It was Saturday, Dec. 1, 1922, a few days after Thanksgiving, and a quarter of New Bern was in flames. Northward, the spire of First Presbyterian Church, oldest church building in New Bern, rose in the sky; a little to the left and behind he could see Caleb Bradham’s Pepsi-Cola plant, and to the left of that the city’s school buildings, including the historic New Bern Academy and Bell Building, showed through the treetops. Beyond, the sky was a cauldron of roiling smoke.

Fighting against cold and the nearly gale-force wind that drove the fire, he set up his tripod, mounted his camera, and took several shots.

Those photographs have been preserved, and are among a collection of graphic photos that record the largest urban fire in North Carolina history. This past November, Empire Properties of Raleigh, current owners of the Elks building, granted the Sun Journalpermission to shoot a matching comparison photo from its roof.

Little remains the same: the most prominent feature, the First Presbyterian Church, still stands, as do a few other buildings including homes on Hancock Street, the Bell Building and Academy (one is visible in each shot), and the Alexander Miller Store building (whose roof is seen in the foreground). Other buildings, even though historic to us, were undreamed of in 1922: among them the oil mill silo, built in the 1940s and used to store soy beans; and the old Fire Station on Broad Street, now vacated by the fire department and under renovation by the Firemen’s Museum.

It was not only wind that made the fire so terrible: other seemingly small events conspired in a kind of reverse-serendipity to destroy much of the town.

First, New Bern’s high school football team was playing an Eastern North Carolina championship game against the Sanford High team at Riddick Stadium in Raleigh. Fans — including many of the city’s firemen — drove their cars over the bumpy roads while nearly 300 people rode a special seven-car train to the event. That train, after being serenaded by the high school band, pulled out of Union Station at 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning.

The second event took place at the Roper Lumber Mill on the north side of town. It started at 8:30 a.m. in the saw-mill itself when one of the machine belts was “hung up” and created “a violent friction,” according to the New Bernian (an ancestor of the Sun Journal) newspaper's Dec. 2 edition. The fire caused by the friction ignited saw dust and “in ten minutes the entire saw mill was in flames.” At 8:35 the alarm was called in and a depleted fire department brought everything it had to battle the growing blaze.

Page 2 of 3 - The Roper Mill employed a large number of the city’s African Americans. “Some of the colored employees,” the New Bernianwent on, “realizing that winter is at hand and that their means of livelihood had been suddenly snatched away from them, wept openly.” But New Bern’s black community had only begun to feel the devastation that would visit them that day.

One local resident, 93-year-old Thomas Blow of McCarthy Court, was a witness of that fire. Though only three at the time of the fire, Blow remembers the “startling” images in his mind.

“I was living on King Street,” about two blocks away from the fire. “Just down at the end of the block was this huge lumber mill, which was the first to catch fire. And my maid took me down there to see it.” He recalled that the firemen “were without any food or anything … And all of the people down there went back to their homes and made sandwiches and brought them up.”

The third event happened on the other side of town, in the Henry Bryan house at 30 Kilmarnock Street, near the present-day Day’s Hotel building, when a faulty terra cotta chimney flue went ablaze shortly before 10 a.m. With no fire equipment available due to the Rolland fire, the Bryans and their neighbors tried desperately to put out the fire with buckets. The wind quickly carried the blaze to the neighboring house which stood only a few feet away and, within half an hour, several houses were burning, sweeping in a north-east pattern toward Queen Street and, eventually, the Neuse River.

The driver of the first hose wagon that arrived to fight the Kilmarnock fire discovered that there was no nozzle to hook up the fire hose, and the wagon had to be driven back to the station to retrieve it.

As the fire approached George Street about noon, Fire Chief James Bryan made the decision to start dynamiting homes along Queen and Metcalf streets to form a firebreak. Giving families only a couple of minutes to take any belongings they could grab, kegs of 10 to 20 pounds of dynamite were set inside the houses and the fuses lit. Soon homes were collapsing into piles of rubble. As the Raleigh Observer noted, however, “It proved to be of little worth. No human agency could thwart the combined force of fire and wind.” When the blaze reached George Street, the wind carried balls of fire over the cemetery, setting Pasteur Street ablaze.

By 1 p.m. Bryan was calling in fire companies from Kinston and Washington to assist in battling the fire.

Residents were dragging their belongings into the street in advance of the fire: unpublished memoirs recall the sight of pianos along the sidewalks by the cemetery and of trucks, driven by both blacks and whites, racing back and forth to help salvage furnishings from homes in the line of the fire.

Page 3 of 3 - Along with hundreds of homes, numerous businesses and churches burned down. The largest church to burn was AME Zion, on Queen Street across from the cemetery. St. Cyprian’s, the black Episcopal church just two blocks up, was spared and used as an emergency hospital.

By 1 p.m. the Roper fire was under control; the city fire peaked about 3 p.m. and was declared under control at about 5:15.

In the end

The fire’s lone fatality was Harriet Reeves, a “poor and aged colored woman” who was purported to be 105 years old. A 1997 Sun Journal article quotes Ben Gaskill as stating that she was being escorted from her house when she went back in to retrieve some unknown item and was overcome by the smoke.

In the end, 989 buildings in nearly 40 blocks were destroyed. Nearly 100 houses on Queen and Metcalf streets were dynamited and another six on Queen Street were pulled down by a train engine. The Red Cross reported 3,530 people, the vast majority African American, were without homes and jobs. A tent city was set up two days later along George Street, serving as a temporary home for nearly three months, while the West Street School was used as a center for housing and feeding the refugees.

The city took over that property, not allowing blacks to rebuild in that area. Instead, Kafer Park, the tennis courts, Cedar Grove Extension Cemetery and the senior citizen center were built. An armory was also built at the corner of Queen and George streets — the police department is there now.

Many blacks moved out of the area and the town and the majority population in New Bern switched from being slightly more than half African American to being slightly more than half Caucasian. In addition to the opening of George Street to civic projects, the fire also inspired the Rev. R.I. Johnson of St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church to found the Good Shepherd hospital for the black population, in order to better serve that community in North Carolina’s segregated days. That former hospital now serves as an old age home for the community.

The scars of the fire would last for years. “I used to take strolls with my dad when I was about twelve years old down that way,” Tom Blow remembers. “One house after the other, it was just the chimney remaining. It was a tremendous stretch that didn’t recover or rebuild for years. And you just had these remains. It was just a chimney. That was all! Everything else was gone.”